The Paris Agreement culminates a six-year transition towards an international climate policy architecture based on parties submitting national pledges every five years. An important policy task will be to assess and compare these contributions. We use four integrated assessment models to produce metrics of Paris Agreement pledges, and show differentiated effort across countries: wealthier countries pledge to undertake greater emission reductions with higher costs.

At the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in December 2015, 195 countries adopted the first universal global climate agreement which sets out a global action plan to combat climate change. The Paris agreement is anchored on the implementation between 2020 and 2030 of nationally determined contributions.

The literature on the costs of climate change often draws a link between climatic ‘tipping points’ and large economic shocks, frequently called ‘catastrophes’. The phrase ‘tipping points’ in this context can be misleading. In popular and social scientific discourse, ‘tipping points’ involve abrupt state changes. For some climatic ‘tipping points,’ the commitment to a state change may occur abruptly, but the change itself may be rate-limited and take centuries or longer to realize.

The International Center for Climate Governance (ICCG) announces the publication of its 2015 “Climate Think Tank Ranking”, the authoritative and worldwide known assessment of the most cutting-edge institutions working in the field of climate change economics and policy.

In June 2015, the G7 agreed to two global mitigation goals: 'a decarbonization of the global economy over the course of this century' and 'the upper end of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recommendation of 40%–70% reductions by 2050 compared to 2010'.